This knowledge base article from Microsoft will guide you through the steps to resolve the following problems:
The pointer may move erratically.
The pointer may not respond when you move the pointing device.
Button clicks may have no effect.
The pointing device may stop working after a few minutes of use.
Some options or tabs may be unavailable in the Mouse tool in Control Panel.
If you connect a Microsoft Plug and Play Serial Mouse, Microsoft EasyBall, or Microsoft IntelliMouse to your computer, the new device may not be detected by Microsoft Windows. Running the Add New Hardware Wizard does not resolve the issue.
Just in case you cared, this is the mouse I use. Simple, basic, and works well for me (smaller hands).
Seems ThinkAll wasn't the first time this company has ripped people off. It seems they used to be Manay Software and had been running the exact same scam. Read the ThinkAll rip off report that has save many people from losing money.
Check out these reports on Manay Software. Look familiar?
Another delay with getting back online and back to blogging, work, email, and just life as normal for me. Last week on the last day of vacation I received a call that my apartment had been destroyed by a flood of water. The upstairs apartment flooded mine with over 1000 gallons of water and took down the ceiling on top of everything. What a mess.
I should be back in a day or so once I can get things setup.
Bryce 3D: "Create breathtakingly realistic 3D landscapes and animations with DAZ Bryce 5. Striking an optimum balance between power and ease of use, this innovative software is an ideal way to integrate 3D technology into your creative process. Smooth network rendering saves valuable time by letting you render images on multiple computers. The Light Lab gives you robust control over lighting direction, and the Tree Lab ensures a more accurate depiction of real-world environments. Plus, an intuitive user interface simplifies the design process."
I really wanted to get this posted as soon as possible. Bryce 3D is one of those fun applications.
Just got into Chattanooga, TN and looking forward to checking out what this city has to offer.
I haven't spent this much time away from the computer in a long time. Feels both nice and strange at the same point. Reason it feels strange is I feel so disconnected from 'information'. Haven't read a blog in days...
Is this the new Amazon video store?: "People were snatching early glimpses of what may be Amazon.com's new video store on Friday, after a former employee posted screenshots of the store on his blog."
Heading out of town for vacation and completed another website. Brenda Kyzer a pro racquetball player asked me to do a website for her and of course I said yes. Where am I going? Heading to Chattanooga, TN. Hopefully I will get some time to blog a bit at night but expect the posts to be really slow next week. Now if I can just unglue this keyboard from my hands I will be all set to go.
Google Analytics has been open to anyone who wants to try it out and try it out you should. Google Analytics, which was once Urchin, is the best free web stats tool around. I have been testing this for a couple of months and the stas it reports far exceeds anything else you can use; like Webalizer or Awstats. Plus you don't need to get the logs or keep the logs on your servers.
Downside? Google will learn and have knowledge about every aspect of your website. You think Google is stupid? Of course not. This is just another way for them to collect and store data on you. Feed me seymour!
You can easily add a slideshow to any website using the services provided by Slide. Pictures can come from various sources like: Flickr, Photobucket, MySpace, or your hard drive. The only thing I wish they allowed was the removal of the slideshow aspect and an option for just a click through gallery.
Oh and the resultant slideshow is in Flash format.
PortSwigger.net contains a great collection of freeware web application hack tools. The best way to see what they are all about is to download the Burp Suite and give it a try.
Google Local Business Center now allows a business to add coupons to their listings. This is cool for people like me who are always using Google Maps for locating local business'.
Let Google users print your coupons and bring them to your business.Coupons will appear alongside your business listing on Google Maps.
WAssociate makes editing file associations on your Windows system a snap. It will let you control everything from the default icons, to the file that opens when a file is double-clicked. I usually go straight into the registry for doing this but now it seems that WAssociate will make things just a bit easier. I know Windows does this but I never really liked working through the provided interface.
A beta version of Blogger is being released which adds functionality. The only new things that I can see is;
Categorize your posts with labels
Control who can read your blog
Change the appearance and content of your blog with your mouse instead of HTML
I currently do not have access to the Beta but will post when i get to play around with it - I don't feel like creating a new account just to play around with it (ok. maybe I will)
Microsoft announced its Build Your Own Xbox Game program where they will give anyone who wants it the ability to design and create a game for the X-box gaming system. What's the catch? A $99 yearly fee. Not bad considering a game costs $50 and you probably would get more milage out of this than any one game - if you're into this sorta thing.
Windows Live Writer beta was released by Microsoft. Since I really don't have much to say about this you should check out the blog entry to learn more about it. Windows Live, for some reason, bores me - no reason but it does...
I need to find an image of Veign in the wild. I think there is a town in Germany called Veign - anyone have a picture of a street sign? If so, send it my way.
SarahinTampa's blog contains one of the best lists for videos on the Web. Not only do you get an organized list but you get a brief description of what you can expect to find at the site.
Zoomerang makes it quite easy to setup, distribute and analyze an online survey. They have a basic version that is free but very limited, however for a 'real' survey its gonna cost you a pretty penny.
FreePatentsOnline.com provides fast, free patent searching, with powerful features such as PDF downloading, search managment functions, collaborative document folders, and more. Sign up today -- it's free!
User Agent String Utility 2: "A utility that opens an Internet Explorer 7.0 window that is configured to report its identity to websites as being Internet Explorer 6.0."
Had a test system (old laptop used for testing and traveling) with IE7 Beta 2 installed. I followed the steps outlined by the IE team for removing beta 2 and installing beta 3 and, of course, it didn't work. Could no stop the error about a previous version installed which prevented the install of beta 3.
Here's what finally worked after many attempts at various things (thanx to comments on the IE Blog):
A photoshop contest asking for the worst ideas for a toy resulted in some very funny entrants. How would you like a Kevorkian Kit or Babies First Lighter?
MSDN Library May 2006 Edition: "The MSDN® Library is an essential resource of information for developers using Microsoft® tools, products, and technologies."
Wow. Microsoft is now making the MSDN library free for all from now on. Impressive.
Sysinternals Freeware's BOOT.INI Reference is one of the most complete references for the boot.ini file and its option reference. Not too sure how many would have a need for this but it's nice to know its around if you ever do.
Patch in for McAfee holes: "McAfee has patched flaws in its SecurityCenter software, pervasive technology found in all of its consumer products from VirusScan to Total Protection to its Internet Security Suite."
Not like I use McAfee but thought other may need to know about this.
"Pulling together interesting search trends and patterns requires Google's human and computing power together. Search statistics are automatically generated based on the millions of searches conducted on Google over a given period of time - weekly, monthly, and annually."
Ok, so its not as good as the AOL screw up but its something.
(does this mean I need to be blogging about reichen lehmkuhl (#1 search this week) to get more traffic - yeah, right!)
From these AOL search data mirrors that have been setup now you can see the 600,000 search results.
Amazing when you start looking through that someone thought this was a good idea. When you start looking through the data you can start to identify people and the searches they are doing (some kinda scary).
Still deciding on whether I will throw up a quick website to make the search results searchable...
Digital Photography Tutorials is probably one of the best collections of digital photography tutorials I have come across. While on the site be sure to check out his gallery and the amazing pictures he has taken.
(Before I give the information I am warning that I in no way am pushing pirated software just writing what others seem to think is the best)
Hiren's BootCD seems to be what others have determined to be the ultimate boot CD. If you want to do this right then you won't use this download link - you would instead purchase the proper licenses for all software.
The boot CD that I have used for a long time is the Ultimate Boot CD and is a freeware solution. Also, in a pinch Knoppix or Slax can be of great help.
With Yahoo! Search Builder you can create a custom Web search engine by selecting a set of trusted sites to search across or you can tune the search algorithm to the topic of your choice. Beyond Web search, Search Builder includes Site search and News search.
Reviews for Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, 128 fl oz: Gourmet Food: "Initially it has a strong, buttery nose, mellowing to a midnote of oak and fromage. Suddenly the cream and lactose burst forth in a rush, startling you and making you fall backwards from your chair. The milk then tapers off into a smooth, tightly-wound finish that keeps the nose from being overblown. Generous structure and appealing acidity."
The Google Maps flight sim is a flight simulator made from Google Maps that is actually done pretty good. Just use the arrow keys to move the plane left-right and up-down. Kinda of fun to play around with.
Google Webmaster Central: "Your one-stop shop for comprehensive info about how Google crawls and indexes websites. You can learn here how to ensure that your site is easily crawled and indexed and access tools that will enable you to diagnose crawling issues, study statistics on how your site is doing in our index, and tell us how you'd like your site to be crawled and indexed. "
The Deep Sky Frontier is a webpage that is 9 quadrillion pixels wide by 9 quadrillion pixels tall or 8,100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pixels (8.1 nonillion).
First a little background of how it came to be that I, and my clients, were hosted with Netbunch. I researched for a long time to find an affordable hosting company that offered me the ability to resell some of the space and provided a stable server with good support. Mesopia.com is what I had finally settled upon.
Mesopia.com was a great hosting company run by knowledgeable people that were there to answer any questions and resolve any problems. Mesopia at some point re-branded itself into Netbunch.com and acquired a couple more hosting companies to bring under its umbrella: Dr2.net and someone else I can't remember right now.
Netbunch.com, which was Mesopia.com, had some growing pains but their Windows Admin was always there to get problems resolved and answer any IM's I sent him. During this time there was down time, server issues, and control panel problems. But then again its not about locating a company that has no problems, its about locating a company that can handle issues when they come up and that's what the Mesopia / Netbunch did very well.
Sound good, right? Wrong. The trouble begins immediatly after Netbunch.com was bought out by WebHostPlus.com. (note: WebHostPlus is notoriuos for buying and destroying web hosting companies; read about what they did to 1planhost.com, managed.com, and of course Netbunch.com).
The problems I had, and many others, is ignoring trouble tickets for weeks on end, email going down for days and weeks with no reponse from tech support, lost access to the Plesk control panel again with no response from tech support. I used to call their 800# and talk to the Windows admin manager to try and beg to get things fixed. That isn't going to happen as they have blocked my area code from calling their 800#. The constant downtime, ignoring of trouble tickets, lies when you get them on the phone or through online chat, extremely poor management and just the fact that everyone has problems with them.
WebHostPlus.com / Netbunch.com / Managed.com / Dinix.com / 1planhost.com / Dr2.net should be avoided at all costs.
(I now have a virtual dedicated server with GoDaddy and have been very happy)
Blogger has been very flakey over the past few days. There are times where it takes hours to get a new blog post to post up. Hopefully this will get resolved so my blogging can resume as normal.
StarLogo TNG is The Next Generation of StarLogo modeling and simulation software. While this version holds true to the premise of StarLogo as a tool to create and understand simulations of complex systems, it also brings with it several advances. Through TNG we hope to
Lower the barrier to entry for programming by making programming easier.
Entice more young people into programming through tools that facilitate making games.
Create compelling 3D worlds that encompass rich games and simulations.
Windows XP SP2 users can disable the ability to write to a USB thumbdrive by:
Start RegEdit: Click Start -> Run -> type RegEdit and click OK
Go to the key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control
Right-click on that key and create a new key called StorageDevicePolicies
Right-click on the new key and add a DWORD called WriteProtect with a value of 1
Note: Entering a value of 0 allows write access again
Afraid to edit the registry? Then download a simple to use Reg File (just double click the file and edits are made) from Veign's Registry Hacks section (bottom of the page).
AOL to Go Free in September: "Time Warner said Wednesday it would no longer charge broadband users of its online service AOL in a move designed to boost advertising revenue. While the company will still offer dial-up access at $25.90 USD per month, it would no longer be aggressively marketed."
Windows Live Spaces launched earlier and is, obviously, a MySpace clone. Just what we need: another place for pervs to hang out prying on kids.
At least Microsoft didn't include all the MySpace visual vomit in their design and layout. As you can tell I can't stand MySpace from a design standpoint.
I found a link to Krugle over on SarahInTampa's blog and I must say this search engine has a lot of potential. I did some quick searches and the results are quite impressive. Results shown as snippets that open in a virtual tab when clicked makes viwing the code online simple and powerful.
Cons: They need a lot more independant sources and not to get stuck with SourceForge and such as the only source for code.
Stardock just released Object Desktop 2007 that lets you totally customize the Windows experience. From the look and feel to the usability this is one package that lets you change everything.
I just don't trust applications that make that many changes to Windows. Seems like there would be either stability issues or performance problems. Anyone have experience with Stardock products?
Note-It is one of my most popular applications. This is a very simple, easy to use post-it type application. I just released a new version with some minor fixes and even more shortcut key support added.
It's Freeware, actually Postcardware (send me a postcard if you like the application) but same difference.
You can easily add a slideshow to any website using the services provided by 
Like the Veign 2.0 logo? This was done using an 
Had a test system (old laptop used for testing and traveling) with IE7 Beta 2 installed. I followed the 
A photoshop contest asking for the 
Stardock just released 
